Saturday in the Park with Neil

On Friday, as I was riding my bike through Central Park on the way to the office, I heard the bass-heavy sound of electric guitars in the distance. I veered off my usual route and pedalled in whatever direction made the sound grow louder. A few minutes later I was on the edge of the Great Lawn with four or five dozen slightly dazed other people, watching and listening and congratulating one another on our luck. A hundred or so yards away, on a stage framed by an immense, circular proscenium arch, Neil Young was doing his sound check: two songs with his band Crazy Horse, one with just his own guitar. The latter, which I’d never heard, begins, “The first time I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’…” It’s a kind of fan letter to Dylan and others, including the Grateful Dead and Roy Orbison—Young’s answer to “American Pie,” though of course much, much better.

The real show—a consciousness-raiser for the Global Poverty Project—was on Saturday. Unexpectedly, as unexpectedly as stumbling across the sound check had been, I found myself in possession of three tickets—never mind how, but good deeds will be reciprocated. The concert, scheduled to last five hours, began at 5 P.M., but we—me, wife, kid—couldn’t get there till halfway through. Making our way through a long and winding security labyrinth, we got as far as, oh, about a quarter of a mile from the stage. The performers were eighth-of-an-inch-high figures in the distance, and anyhow our view of them was blocked by the heads of the roughly fifty-eight thousand people standing in front of us (the crowd was sixty thousand strong), and the giant video screens were a fraction of a second slightly out of sync with the live sound, and we had been forced to empty our water bottle at the gate, and we had missed the opening acts (the Somali-Canadian rapper K’naan, the band called Band of Horses, a surprise appearance by John Legend, who had sung “Imagine” practically in the shadow of the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and died, which must have been quite moving, and the Black Keys, who, our fourteen-year-old son assured us, is one of the coolest bands in the world)—but so what? We were utterly content to just be there at all, under a canopy of clouds lit from below by the city lights and from above by a full moon. And with the volume cranked up to eleven.

The Foo Fighters—whose leader, Dave Grohl, hinted that this might be their last appearance—seemed happy to be there, too, and energized. Their strong, simple, arena-friendly hooks, as in “My Hero” and “Times Like These” were a fine fanfare for what followed.

Neil Young, sixty-seven years old next month, is a wonder. His voice is rougher and lower than it was when I first heard it, forty-six years ago, at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. But it’s as strong as it was in his Buffalo Springfield days, and as distinctive, and as clear, with those emphatic Canadian “r”s. Even against the cacophony of Crazy Horse’s tsunami of sound, you don’t need a lyric sheet to understand the words he sings the first time you hear them. You get the music and you get the meaning.

Back then he was a diffident young buck. Now he’s a lion, thrashing and roaring. He’s a buffalo in an autumn field, snorting and pawing the plain of the stage. For more than an hour, every minute of it intense, he sang and played, loped and ducked and stomped. This is not an oldies act. There was no “Everybody Knows,” no “Heart of Gold,” no “Old Man” (except the ones on the stage). From the long-ago past, only “The Needle and the Damage Done,” which he sang accompanied solely by his own acoustic guitar. (The set was beautifully paced.)

The shortage of “greatest hits” mattered not at all. In his late sixties Young is a volcano of creativity. The song about hearing “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time was proof enough of that. For me, though, the night’s high point was another new composition of his, “Walk Like a Giant.” The lyrics are about disillusionment ("I used to walk like a giant on the land / Now I feel like a leaf floating on the stream"), but the music, its thunderous, feedback-rich electric guitars set off by a jaunty whistled bridge, is about defiance. Its stunning conclusion was a long series of stomps: Neil in his thick farmer’s boots slamming the floor—thud! thud! thud!—and putting his whole body into it, with every thud augmented by a bone-rattling guitar chord. It was as if we were being stalked by a tyrannosaur as big as the Beresford.

The concert ended the only way it properly could, with everyone on stage with the master, “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The last note faded at exactly 10 P.M.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.

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